Some anti-futurology on The Age of the Universe

Confession: although I am a futurologist and look forwards most of the time, I also enjoy pre-history. In fact, my father is Dr Gordon Pearson, who won the Pomerance Award for his contributions to archaeology, producing a calibration curve for C14 proportion against the age of a sample, thereby facilitating many other researchers’ work on ancient civilization going back 50,000 years, and who was one of the first to measure accurately the correlation between sunspot activity and climate. I inherited his time-traveler gene and conventional generational inversion was then applied.

I wrote a short piece a month or two back on the acceleration of the universe

I have been irritated by the bad science that has jumped illogically to the conclusion of dark matter and dark energy as the reason for acceleration. Occam’s razor needed to be used so I took it out. I noted that as galaxies expand and move further away from each other, Higgs particle flux must fall so the mass of the galaxies must fall, so their speed must increase to conserve energy. Then I moved on to work that pays my bills. So I missed a bit. If my theory above is correct (and in that regard, I should note that I have forgotten much of the Physics I learned at university, and some of the rest is now wrong anyway), then it must also be true that the universe was accelerating much more slowly in the past when the galaxies were close together, and its mass must have been much higher.

So if you assume, as I now do, that when observing red shifts today, when we are moving faster than before due to that ongoing acceleration, that we are measuring higher speeds than those light emitting galaxies had when they emitted that light, and by assuming relatively constant mass, as is also seemingly assumed, then the earlier speeds must have been far less, therefore we must be looking at too steep a curve for backward extrapolation to the beginning. Therefore the estimate for the age of the universe of 13.82 Billion years is too low. I no longer have the maths skills or physics knowledge to calculate an age that takes my theory into account, but engineer’s intuition suggests it would be 15Bn years or possible even more.

As I’ve cautioned, perhaps you should take my theory with a pinch of salt. There is much I don’t understand. But I do understand enough to know that combinations of group-think and intense focus sometimes mean that scientists overlook gorillas standing right in front of them as they concentrate on their current equations. Unlikely as it is, I might possibly be right.

2 responses to “Some anti-futurology on The Age of the Universe”

Even Einstein could be wrong. His efforts to tie the quantum world with relativity took him down tangents as he tried to create a unified theory. I fight dark matter and dark energy to be theoretical constructs for x = unknown. Remember when 98% of DNA was considered junk. Another x = unknown that is slowly being shattered by new science. One thing you and others who study cosmology can agree on is the Universe is darn old. I looked at a book my father gave to me when I was 8, “The Boy Scientist.” In it the writer described theories of the Universe comparing Big Bang to Steady State and other cosmological evolutionary constructs. Today we talk about multiverses and voids and black holes. None of this was a dust mote in scientists’ eyes when that book was written.

Indeed. I’d be very happy if it turns out I am right, but I won’t hold my breath. My sci-fi book has some ideas which I am pretty sure will remain just sci-fi, like the space anchor, but they do make the stuff in the book work..

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I D Pearson BSc DSc(hc) FWAAS CITP FBCS FWIF

About me

I’m an all-round futurist/futurologist with a sound engineering foundation and over 1800 inventions. I spend most of my time writing futures material for white papers or to accompany PR campaigns, but I’ve also delivered well over 1000 conference presentations and appeared over 750 times on TV and Radio, often following writing I’ve done for PR campaigns. I’ve written hundreds of commissioned reports, press articles and seven books, most recently Society Tomorrow, Space Anchor, Total Sustainability and You Tomorrow (2nd Edn). I sometimes undertake phone or face-to-face consultancy on any aspect of the future, usually from a technology perspective, using over 30 years experience as a futurologist and engineer. I have demonstrated about 85% accuracy when looking 10-15 years ahead.

I am a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the World Academy for Arts and Science and the World Innovation Foundation.